Andrei Pop Video Game Case History STS 145

Andrei Pop Video Game Case History STS 145 Auteurship and Narrative Modulation in Eric Chahi’s Another World 1991 was a watershed year for video games in many ways. Nintendo released their much-anticipated second generation console machine, the SNES, late that year. On the PC front, Russell Kay’s Lemmings and Sid Meyer’s Civilization were redefining the god-game/resource management genre. In a small French development house, the software branch of the French media company Delphine, a subtler revolution was brewing. A lone visionary programmer was preparing for release on the Amiga platform a computer action game that posed a radical departure from the objective, monotone perspectives of earlier games; a game that for all its violence maintained a poetic aura of unreality and emphasized exploratory thinking as codependent with sure reflex as a skill necessary to complete the game. The game, published in Europe and Australia as Another World, (cornily rechristened Out of this World by Interplay for its US release) brought phenomenal success for an European software product but spawned no empire: a sequel flopped starkly, and Eric Chahi went on to found his own company and release a game that partially elaborated on the innovations of his breakthrough, before disappearing from the software scene for the past four years. Yet the impact of Another World cannot be measured easily. Though unassuming in its advertising and only mildly successful commercially, Another World represents a minor turning point in the evolution of video game narration, by marrying great interactivity with a relentlessly episodic, varied presentation that forced the player to perpetually adjust her perspective on the action, without breaking the continuity of the story. This comes as a surprisingly practical answer to a question that has been plaguing interactive media theorists since the nascent days of the technology. That question is: can narrative and interaction coexist, or must one always work to undermine the other? The Narrative Conundrum Busy as Chahi and his collaborators at Delphine must have been with the day-to- day of designing an offbeat game, it is unlikely that they ever discussed or fully appreciated the theoretical implications of their product. Another World to deconstruct the duality often invoked by video game theorists between the active, open-ended ideal of gaming and the passive, closed structure of literary reading. This duality, first elaborated by William Crowther, who saw structured narrative as antithetical to the exploratory spirit of gaming. This conflict, as befits its proponents, harks back to the prehistory of video games, and especially to the Dungeons & Dragons genre of interactive role- playing, where narrative was subject to certain rules of combat and resource management, but beyond that lay at the discretion of the “dungeon master”, an omnipotent non-player who orchestrated the group adventures (Eric Roberts lecture, Jan 17th History of Computer Games). Computer games have usually taken more effort to develop (if only because of the programming involved) that oral sword-and-sorcery scenarios, and particularly in the past ten years, with the rapid ascent of multimedia, both the expense and effort required by the construction of a technically competent video game have militated against freewheeling player control on the story. The usual solution (shall we call it the Final Fantasy Fallacy?) is to funnel player choice through several branching points in the story— whether or not the player returns to explore alternate paths (Murray, 155) the gimmick of player decision adds some spice to what may otherwise seem like an elaborately scripted spectacle. However, in such cases, it is not clear that a richly immersive experience can be equated with player freedom. Steven Poole impulsively declares any game successful that allows the player to encounter the greatest “semantic richness” in its content, but semantic richness can be found more amply in noninteractive media like written fiction and film than in purely interactive media. To reduce the argument ad absurdum, consider Space Invaders. Within the constraints of the game’s symbolic elements (a scrolling turret, impermanent shields, advancing ranks of aliens), the player has the freedom to craft any story: a dazzling conquest, an ambivalent hard-won reprieve, or a shattering defeat are all possible, but in terms of aesthetic or intellectual or emotional impact on the player these varieties in outcome account to almost nothing. You are blasting aliens with a gun and nothing more. The power to shock into thinking, to alienate, to call into question established beliefs—characteristics of art as it has been understood for centuries—cannot be recreated exclusively through control over the storyline. The narrative/interaction duality is unstable in that the conflict is grounded in a naïve notion of reading. Recent theories in literary criticism (though in fact all of them predate Crowther and the video game theorists) view the role of the reader as an active synthesizer and conductor of the fragmented linguistic substrate that is the written text (cf. Umberto Eco, Introduction to The Role of the Reader). In this sense, the reader’s imagination may respond quite differently to, but be equally active in interpreting, a punctilious historical romance and a minimalist mood experiment. What matters, then is not so much whether a text is a “narrative” or not, since a reader can construct a story out of almost any set of facts, however disjointed, but the stylistic devices and strategies the author uses to subtly influence and deflect the reader’s imagination down various paths. This reception theory of reading, whether or not one accepts it, implies the quite commonsensical observation that a text can have an infinite number of meanings, one for each reader, or even multiple meanings for the same reader under different circumstances. Applying this truism to Crowther’s description of a simultaneously interactive and narrative video game, one of which he despairs as implausible (it would require an almost infinite number of screens in a text-game format), a practical question can be posed: why not make a game with a well-told, linear storyline, and allow the user enough control over the advancement of that storyline so that she will feel at once like spectator and star, or reader and author? That is an effect that the early Infocom mystery games accomplished quite effortlessly, as did the pre-Playstation Final Fantasy titles with their in-game integration of cut scenes. It is an effect that Another World also creates with remarkable results. If an illusion of narrative autonomy is outside the reach of these games, there is still room within the plurality of electronic gaming world for stories in a singular pronoun, besides the “coherent systems of interrelated actions” (Murray, 181) of more kaleidoscopic games like SimCity. How this fusion of story and action came to be embodied in a 5 and ½ inch floppy disk is a story worth charting. Enter Eric Chahi Eric Chahi became enamored of the idea of making video games for a living at an early age, and to that end he taught himself electronics. His grade school math teacher ran a computer club, and under his tutelage Eric wrote some little programs. In 1983, still in middle school, he sold his very first games, “Carnival” and “Frog”, to the French importer of the Oric personal computer; a year later came “Sceptre de Anubis” and “Doggy”, a dog obstacle course game written in assembly and published by French software vendor Loriciel. While working on his next game, “Le Pacte” for the Amstrad PC, Eric left high school to concentrate on programming. A professional and personal turning point emerged in his life: he fell in love with drawing, and became so proficient at graphic design (particularly computer-aided) that Delphine Software hired him as a freelance artist to oversee the rendition of its first entry into the game business, Future Wars, a graphical adventure game in the Space Quest vein (Schlund web biography). It was while working on Future Wars at Delphine that Chahi made some of his most rewarding professional contacts in the game world. He befriended Daniel Morais, who tirelessly worked on the Windows and DOS port of Another World before embarking with Chahi on the latter’s last project, the much-anticipated Heart of Darkness, which was finally released in 1998, after six years in development (Schlund). Chahi also met Jean Francois Freitas, a musician whose knack for ominous, minimalist tones would serve Chahi well as the aural manifestation of Another World’s hallucinatory alien vistas. Just as importantly, Chahi’s work ethic and resourcefulness impressed Deplhine’s senior designer Paul Cuisset, who willingly ceded the reins to Chahi when the latter proposed that Delphine fund his project, Another World. “It Took Six Days to Create the Earth... …Another World took two years”, trumpeted the game’s packaging, latching on an eccentricity of the design process that was somewhat inconceivable in the videogame industry of ten years ago. Another World was released by Delphine Software on the DOS and Windows 3.x platforms on 1991, and on SNES, Genesis, Sega CD in 1993. The game was published by Interplay, a savvy company that maintained a long working relationship with Delphine. How Delphine tolerated this snail’s pace of production is not hard to imagine: they paid Chahi a pittance for the duration of development, and needed a second staff member only for several months—Freitas wrote the music, Chahi tested it and integrated it with the game code, and the product was ready. As for the issue of why Another World took so long to realize, the question is tightly bound up with the game’s originality. While developing Future Wars, Chahi devised a graphics technique he called “Cinematique”, which used a multiplane scrolling system to generate greater realism by portraying differences in movement seen with depth as distance progresses to the horizon (Giovetti, The Computer Show).

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